Fast Facts: Economic Security

for Texas Families

By Ryan Erickson, Danielle Corley, and Maggie Jo Buchanan

June 29, 2016

In Texas and across the United States, Americans need policies that promote economic
security for women and families. Working families need higher livable wages, women need
and deserve equal pay for equal work, and parents need to be able to maintain good jobs
that allow them to work and raise their children simultaneously. Strong economic security
policies will enable Texas women and families to get aheadnot just get by.
For most Texans, the days of the stay-at-home mom are history: Mothers are the primary or co-breadwinners in 61 percent of Texas families.1 This is not surprising since
most women in the state workmore than 65 percent of Texas women are in the labor
force.2 If women had not increased their labor force participation rate between 1963 and
2013, inequality in the state would have grown 58 percent more quickly.3 To promote
womens economic security, Texas policies should address the needs of working mothers and reflect the roles that women are playing to provide for their families. Here are
seven areas in which policymakers and advocates can help women bolster their families
economic security.

Provide access to paid sick days

Everyone gets sick, but not everyone is afforded the time to get better. Many women go
to work sick or leave their sick children at home alone because they fear that they will be
fired for missing work. Allowing employees to earn paid sick days helps keep families,
communities, and the economy healthy.
About 40 million U.S. employees, or 40 percent of the nations private-sector workforce,
do not have access to paid sick days.4 In Texas, the rate is even higher: 45 percent of
private-sector workers, or more than 4 million people, do not have paid sick days.5
If employees must stay home from work because they or their children are ill, the loss
of pay can take a serious tollparticularly on low-income workers, who are the least
likely to have access to paid sick leave.

1 Center for American Progress | Fast Facts: Economic Security for Texas Families

Expand paid family and medical leave

Access to paid family and medical leave would allow workers to be with their newborn
children during the crucial first stages of a childs life, to care for an aging parent or
spouse, or to recover from their own illness.
The United States is the only developed country that does not guarantee access to paid
maternity leave and one of only three developed countries that do not offer broader
family and medical leave insurance.6 Only 12 percent of workers in the United States
have access to paid family leave through their employers.7
The National Partnership for Women & Families gave Texas a D on policies that
help parents of newborn children. Texas does not expand upon federal rights or protections for new and expecting parents who work in the private sector.8

Ensure equal pay

Although federal law prohibits unequal pay for equal work, there is more to do to
ensure that both women and men enjoy the fullest protections against discrimination
across Texas.
Women are the primary, sole, or co-breadwinners in nearly two-thirds of U.S. families
but continue to earn less than their male counterparts.9 Latinas and African American
women experience the sharpest pay disparities.10
Texas women earn just 79 cents for every dollar that Texas men earn.11 The wage gap is
even larger for black women and Latinas in Texas, who respectively earn 59 cents and
44 cents for every dollar that white men earn.12

Expand quality, affordable child care

Families need child care to be able to work, but many families lack access to high-quality
child care options. Parents want and need child care that supports young childrens
development and adequately prepares them for school.
Fifty-nine percent of Texas children younger than age 6 have all available parents in
the workforce, which makes access to affordable, high-quality child care a necessity.13
For a Texas family with one infant and one 4-year-old, child care costs an average of
$15,489 per year, or more than one-quarter of the median income for a Texas family
with children.14

2 Center for American Progress | Fast Facts: Economic Security for Texas Families

 Under the Center for American Progress High Quality Child Care Tax Credit, families in Texas would, on average, save $5,419 annually compared with current child care
costs.15 CAPs proposal would also create a financial incentive for child care providers
to improve their quality, therefore expanding access to high-quality child care programs for Texans.

Increase the minimum wage

Women make up a disproportionate share of low-wage workers, and raising the minimum wage would help hardworking women across Texas better support their families.
Women make up nearly two-thirds of all minimum wage workers in the United States.16
Increasing the minimum wage to $12 per hour would boost wages for nearly 1.9
million women in Texas and nearly 20 million women nationally.17 Nearly 55 percent of the workers in Texas who would be affected by raising the minimum wage
to $12 are women.18

Guarantee access to quality health care

Women need comprehensive reproductive health servicesincluding access to abortion carein order to thrive as breadwinners, caregivers, and employees.
Today, 766,000 Texans fall in the health insurance coverage gapmore than onequarter of all people who would have been insured if their state had expanded
Medicaid. And more than 60 percent of Hispanic adults in the United States that fall
into this coverage gap reside in Texas.20
In the wake of widespread clinic closures as a result of the omnibus anti-choice law
referred to as H.B. 2, between 100,000 and 240,000 women have attempted to end
their pregnancies without medical assistance.21
In 2013, 1,774,240 Texas women were in need of publicly supported family planning services and supplies.22 Between 2011 and 2014, 55 percent of women reported
at least one barrier to accessing reproductive health care services, including cervical
cancer screening or family planning services.23
Funding for family planning services in Texas has been especially threatened by recent
legislative cuts. In 2011, the state legislature cut $73 million in family planning fundinga full two-thirds of the family planning budgetresulting in the loss of access to
care for an estimated 147,000 low-income Texas women.24 While some funding has
been restored, recent research found that these cuts have adversely affected a womans
ability to receive contraception while also significantly increasing the number of births
covered by Medicaid.25

3 Center for American Progress | Fast Facts: Economic Security for Texas Families

Promote womens political leadership

Across the United States, women are dramatically underrepresented in political office:
They make up 51 percent of the population but only 29 percent of elected officials.26
Women make up 50 percent of Texas population but only 33 percent of its elected
officials.27
Women of color make up 28 percent of the states population but only 11 percent of
its officeholders.28
Ryan Erickson is the Associate Director of Economic Campaigns at the Center for American
Progress. Danielle Corley is a Research Assistant for Womens Economic Policy at the Center.
Maggie Jo Buchanan is the Associate Director for Womens Health and Rights at the Center.

4 Center for American Progress | Fast Facts: Economic Security for Texas Families

Endnotes
1 Data are taken from Sarah Jane Glynn and Jeff Chapmans
analysis of Miriam King and others, Integrated Public Use
Microdata Series, Current Population Survey: Version 3.0,
available at https://cps.ipums.org/cps/index.shtml (last
accessed June 2016).
2 Sarah Jane Glynns analysis of Miriam King and others,
Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, Current Population
Survey: Version 3.0. [Machine-readable database] (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2010).
3 Brendan Dukes analysis of data from Sarah Flood and others, Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, Current Population Survey: Version 4.0, available at https://cps.ipums.org/
cps/index.shtml (last accessed June 2016).
4 Elise Gould, Kai Filion, and Andrew Green, The Need for
Paid Sick Days: The lack of a federal policy further erodes
family economic security (Washington: Economic Policy
Institute, 2011), available at http://www.epi.org/publication/the_need_for_paid_sick_days/.
5 Institute for Womens Policy Research and National
Partnership for Women & Families, Workers Access to Paid
Sick Days in the States (2015), available at http://www.
nationalpartnership.org/research-library/work-family/psd/
workers-access-to-paid-sick-days-in-the-states.pdf.
6 International Labour Organization, Maternity and paternity
at work: Law and practice across the world (2014), available
at http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/--dcomm/---publ/documents/publication/wcms_242615.
pdf; Jody Heymann and others, Contagion Nation: A
Comparison of Paid Sick Day Policies in 22 Countries
(Washington: Center for Economic and Policy Research,
2009), available at http://cepr.net/documents/publications/
paid-sick-days-2009-05.pdf.
7 Bureau of Labor Statistics, National Compensation Survey:
Employee Benefits in the United States, March 2015 (U.S. Department of Commerce, 2015), table 32, available at http://
www.bls.gov/ncs/ebs/benefits/2015/ownership/private/
table32a.pdf.
8 States grades in this assessment reflect the degree to
which a states laws improve upon federal law. See National
Partnership for Women & Families, Expecting Better: A
State-by-State Analysis of Laws That Help New Parents
(2014), available at http://www.nationalpartnership.org/
research-library/work-family/expecting-better-2014.pdf.
9 Sarah Jane Glynn, Breadwinning Mothers, Then and Now
(Washington: Center for American Progress, 2014), available
at https://cdn.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Glynn-Breadwinners-report-FINAL.pdf.
10 Anna Chu and Charles Posner, The State of Women in
America: A 50-State Analysis of How Women Are Faring
Across the Nation (Washington: Center for American Progress, 2013), available at https://cdn.americanprogress.org/
wp-content/uploads/2013/09/StateOfWomen-4.pdf.
11 National Womens Law Center, The Wage Gap, State by
State, available at http://nwlc.org/state-by-state/ (last
accessed June 2016).
12 National Womens Law Center, Texas, available at http://
nwlc.org/state/texas/ (last accessed June 2016).
13 Available parents refers to resident parents. See Kids
Count Data Center, Children Under Age 6 with All Parents
in the Labor Force, available at http://datacenter.kidscount.
org/data/tables/5057-children-under-age-6-with-allavailable-parents-in-the-labor-force?loc=7&loct=2#detai
led/2/45/false/869,36,868,867,133/any/11472,11473 (last
accessed June 2016).
14 Child Care Aware of America, Child Care in the
State of: Texas (2015), available at http://usa.childcareaware.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2015State-Fact-Sheets-Texas.pdf; Kids count Data Center,
Median Family Income Among Households With

Children, available at http://datacenter.kidscount.

org/data/tables/65-median-family-income-amonghouseholds-with-children?loc=7&loct=2#detailed/2/45/
false/869,36,868,867,133/any/365 (last accessed June 2016).
15 The cost reduction estimate assumes that the family using
the credit is earning $40,000 annually. Katie Hamm and
Carmel Martin, A New Vision for Child Care in the United
States (Washington: Center for American Progress, 2015),
available at https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/early-childhood/report/2015/09/02/119944/a-new-visionforchild-care-in-the-united-states-3/.
16 National Womens Law Center, Fair Pay for Women Requires
a Fair Minimum Wage (2015), available at http://www.nwlc.
org/resource/fair-pay-women-requires-fair-minimum-wage.
17 Economic Policy Institute, State Tables: Characteristics of
workers who would be affected by increasing the federal
minimum wage to $12 by July 2020 (2015), available at
http://www.epi.org/files/2015/revised-minimum-wagestate-tables.pdf; David Cooper, Raising the Minimum Wage
to $12 by 2020 Would Lift Wages for 35 Million Workers
(Washington: Economic Policy Institute, 2015), Appendix A:
Data tables, available at http://www.epi.org/publication/
raising-the-minimum-wage-to-12-by-2020-would-liftwages-for-35-million-american-workers/.
18 Ibid.
19 Rachel Garfield and Anthony Damico, The Coverage
Gap: Uninsured Poor Adults in States that Do Not Expand
Medicaid An Update (Washington: Henry J. Kaiser Family
Foundation, 2016), available at http://kff.org/health-reform/
issue-brief/the-coverage-gap-uninsured-poor-adults-instates-that-do-not-expand-medicaid-an-update/.
20 Hispanic adults in the coverage gap include those who are
lawfully present or who are U.S. citizens. Anne Dunkelberg,
Closing the Texas Coverage Gap: How Texas Leaders Can
Still help Over 1 Million Texans This Session (Austin: Center
for Public Policy Priorities, 2015), available at http://forabettertexas.org/images/HW_2015_PP_ClosingTXCoverageGap.
pdf.
21 D. Grossman and others, Knowledge, opinion and experience related to abortion self-induction in Texas (Austin:
Texas Policy Evaluation Project, 2015), available at https://
utexas.app.box.com/v/koeselfinductionresearchbrief.
22 Jennifer J. Frost, Lori Frohwirth, and Mia R. Zolna, Contraceptive Needs and Services, 2013 Update (New York:
Guttmacher Institute, 2015), available at https://www.
guttmacher.org/pubs/win/contraceptive-needs-2013.pdf.
23 Texas Policy Evaluation Project, Barriers to Family Planning
Access in Texas (2015), available at http://liberalarts.utexas.
edu/txpep/_files/pdf/TxPEP-ResearchBrief_Barriers-toFamily-Planning-Access-in-Texas_May2015.pdf.
24 Janet Realini, Legislature restores womens preventive care
funding, Texas Academy of Family Physicians, April 19, 2013,
available at http://www.tafp.org/blog/tfp/summer-2013/
perspective; Tara Culp-Ressler, The Family Planning Cuts
That The Texas Legislature Forced Through Are Having Dire
Consequences, ThinkProgress, May 12, 2015, available at
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2015/05/12/3657728/texasreproductive-health-report/.
25 Ibid; Amanda J. Stevenson and others, Effect of Removal
of Planned Parenthood from the Texas Womens Health
Program, The New England Journal of Medicine 374 (9)
(2016): 853860, available at http://www.nejm.org/doi/
pdf/10.1056/NEJMsa1511902%20.
26 Reflective Democracy Campaign, Who Leads Us?, available
at http://wholeads.us (last accessed September 2015).
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid

5 Center for American Progress | Fast Facts: Economic Security for Texas Families